A few days ago, Google and Facebook were criticised for publishing fake news during Las Vegas shooting. But looks like the trend of “Fake News” is still on. Tuesday morning, i.e. 10th October 2017 did not go quite well with Dow Jones too. Dow Jones, a unit of News Corp, published an erroneous story around Google acquiring Apple for $9 billion.

Although, the whole news itself sounded hoax since $9 billion valuation does seem to stand anywhere near to the Apple current market value of over $800 billion.

The fake news mentioned that the whole deal was cut between Alphabet CEO Larry Page and late Steve Jobs per his will. The report cited that Google employees would move to Apple newly built headquarters and for that Google employee reacted in “Yay”.

The news also went ahead and reported that each Google shareholder would receive nine shares of Apple stock.

This news remained active on Dow Jones Newswires for almost two minutes, i.e. between 9:34 a.m. and 9:36 a.m. Later, all related headlines were removed with an apology message from Dow Jones official.

“Please disregard the headlines that ran on Dow Jones Newswires between 9:34 a.m. ET and 9:36 a.m. ET. Due to a technical error, the headlines were published. All of those headlines are being removed from the wires. We apologize for the error.”

Steve Severinghauss, Dow Jones’ director of communication, denied any possibility of hacking and ascribed this incident to a possible technical glitch. However, per William Lewis, Dow Jones CEO and Publishers of The Wall Street Journal, the company is conducting an internal investigation of this episode.

The news did not move the market much except there was a $2 jump in Apple stock price to $158 before settling down to its original price point of $156.

This year has been remarkable for Apple and Google for many reasons. Apple latest iPhone X with face recognition technology has set the tone of the smartphone market whereas Last month Google also unveiled Google revolutionary earbuds supporting 40 language translation in the real-time, extending its previous year AI packed Google Assistant app.

Apple and Google are the two most admired companies of all times. It was obvious for such fake news to catch people attention as the gravity and magnitude of the subject matter were beyond imagination.